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FACETS: New Canadian Open Access Journal

Faculty members looking for a new venue for sharing research will want to know about FACETS, a new multidisciplinary, peer reviewed open access journal published by Canadian Science Publishing. The journal publishes articles in the biological sciences, biomedicine and health, environmental science, engineering, physical sciences, and integrative sciences (such as ethics, public health, science policy, sustainability, etc.).

The creation of this journal is part of a larger shift in academic publishing away from traditional for-profit commercial publishers to an open access landscape that permits faculty members to retain copyright over their intellectual property and facilitate wider sharing of the results of their research. These and other open access benefits prompted the drafting of the Tri-Agency Open Access Policy on Publications, which now requires that research funded by NSERC, SSHRC, and CIHR be made open access.

Dr. Imogen Coe, Dean of the Faculty of Science at Ryerson and one of the editors for the new journal, notes that “The classic routes of publication are extraordinarily expensive for new researchers, for small labs with limited funds and for individuals all over the world who want access but get stuck with expensive paywalls.“

As a new journal, FACETS does not yet have an impact factor, a metric that reflects the average number of citations to articles recently published in a specific journal. Dr. Coe advises emerging researchers to “find a balance between impact factor and other measures of impact and contribution.” She also points out that some researchers mistakenly rely on impact factors as a measure of article quality. “Publication in the highest impact journal in the world – with no subsequent citations suggest that there was really no impact of the contribution. Publication in a low impact journal combined with huge numbers of citations suggests a truly impactful contribution.”

A major challenge for libraries supporting open access publishing is finding sustainable funding to support article processing fees (APCs). FACETS will charge an APC of $1350, which is less than most other APCs. The Ryerson Library provides some support for open access author fees via memberships with Biomed Central, the Public Library of Science, and Hindawi. For more information about open access publishing, the library’s open access author fund, and our Digital Repository, please see: http://learn.library.ryerson.ca/scholcomm.